News & Research

Students Collaborate with National Park Service

04/14/2011

In honor of National Park Week (April 16-24, 2011), an exhibition of work by RISD students opened at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, the Long Island home of America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. More than 25 original works of art – ranging from small handcrafted books to large-scale
furniture pieces – will remain on view through June 5 at the Old Orchard
Museum. The objects all emanated from a creative partnership and unique interdisciplinary course spearheaded by Dale Broholm, a senior critic in Furniture Design.

Several years ago, when Broholmtook his family to Gettysburg National Park in Pennsylvania, he came
back with a lot more than scenic snapshots. The seeds of his radical new idea began to grow after his friend and fellow traveler, National Park Service historian Louis
Hutchins, told him about “specially designated trees that
were there in the landscape during [the battle of Gettysburg] and are still standing.” When Broholm asked what happens once these “witness trees” die, he “learned how by an act of Congress, they have to be
destroyed.... They literally just get put in the chipper” – a loss
that seemed like a natural opportunity.

It was: Teaming up with
Associate Professor of American Studies Daniel Cavicchi and the Park Service’s Olmstead
Center for Landscape Preservation, Broholm carved out an experimental program at RISD called the Witness Tree Project. Part furniture design studio, part American history seminar, the course – about to enter its third year – invites students to explore a period in US history and material culture by
making objects with hallowed wood. They
first visit the site in question, research its history, explore the landscape and conceive of objects that somehow convey some of the history the tree has witnessed. At the end of the course, the work they create is shown in an exhibition at the historic site.

“This is an incredible way
to teach American history to art and design students, who understand material
culture and understand objects,” Cavicchi says. “It has gone far beyond what we expected in
terms of the students’ engagement, and this is entirely unique in that the Park Service has teamed up
with a school in a potentially long-term agreement to use the wood for
educational purposes.”

So far students involved in the Witness
Tree Project have transformed wood from a huge pecan tree at a
Maryland slave plantation and silver maples at Sagamore Hill. In March Cavicchi and Broholm watched as an iconic 200-year-old elm was felled at Fairsted, the home of legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead in Brookline, MA. The tree will provide literal source material for the next course
in Fall 2011, which will revolve around Olmsted’s ideas about
industrialization, cities and public space. Future courses are slated to work
with witness trees from Springwood, the home of Franklin Roosevelt; Val-Kill, the home
of Eleanor Roosevelt; and Lindenwald, the farm of Martin Van Buren.

The first project, in 2009,
confronted one of the most raw chapters in US history: the economy of a
southern plantation. The Maryland site, known as Hampton, triggered an
unexpected dialogue between students and site preservationists, whose tours had
focused on the mansion’s owners and period Georgian architecture. Searching for
the missing stories of slave life, students began to see how history could be
as crafted and interpretive as a designed object.

“Because the tree was
planted by slaves, RISD students became fascinated with trying to make sense of
the very complex social history of this plantation,” says Hutchins. “They asked,
‘Why aren’t you exploring the issue of slavery more?’ And it was right when the
site was putting money into interpreting the slave quarters for the first time.
So the students could see how the interpretation had changed, and they became
part of the process of that interpretation evolving.”

Once the students begin
wrestling with that history, Broholm says, the wood of the witness tree
confronts them with a basic but daunting question: What am I going to make? One
student, Rebecca Manson 11 CR, interpreted the story of slavery by crafting a
13-legged stool with hanging bells: imbalanced, never at rest, and setting off
rhythms that recall both slave songs and a slave’s constant state of alarm.

“Part of what was
really new was how well students digested the material learned in the seminar and how they used it in the formation of these objects,” Broholm says. “Behind
that polyrhythmic stool are some powerful ideas about how a slave was always on
guard, always at the master’s beck and call. And those objects then invited
audiences at Hampton to have a very different kind of conversation.”